This debut collection comprises eleven electrifying
short stories, one of which - the longish, highly empathic ‘The
Outfielder, the Indian-Giver’ - has already appeared in the anthology
Phoenix: Irish Short Stories 1998, edited bythat
great champion of the Irish short story and tireless unearther of
new talent, David Marcus, and subsequently in Dermot Bolger’s Picador
Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction; and another of which, the
mesmerisingly effective title story, was published by Ciaran Carty
in ‘New Irish Writing’ in The Sunday Tribune,andnominated for last year’s Hennessy Award for Best Emerging Fiction.
‘Please’ was broadcast on RTE radio.

Her themes are the nature of love, and coping
with lost love and bereavement; the nature of violence, its uses
and abuses and often inexplicable arbitrariness; and the nature
of loyalty, and difficult moral choices. In ‘Sub Aqua’, sixty-five
year old Hazel finally decides to leave her mute, ex-underground
train-driver husband Jim, who hasn’t spoken for three years, silenced
by the horror of a leaper in front of the train he was driving.
‘I never thought of myself as cruel. I don’t know. There are few
things as cold as loyalty. Perhaps I am dreadfully wrong, but I
know that I cannot go on. I cannot continue with this agony. I can’t.
Oh, God, Jim, I am sorry for this bloodless mutiny. I am so sorry.
I am so sorry. I am so sorry...’ Diane and Vadim in ‘The Klondyker
and The Silver Darlings’ must decide whether to embark on an affair
or remain true to former or current relationships, she to an adulterous
deep-sea fisherman husband, he to a wife who has left him and taken
the kids, but whom he must go on believing he can still get back.
‘And in that moment of rejection she realised, dimly, that she might
be in love with him. She had sought him out, to ease her betrayal,
only to find that he could not betray, that in the diaspora of men
abroad in the world a scrap of something like nobility existed.’
In ‘Among The Gadje’ gypsy Dolores wonders whether her granddaughter
Clare’s marriage to estate agent James represents cowardly closure
or true love, and ponders if her own choice of the settled life
over life on the road was a betrayal of sorts. ‘Clare’s embrace
of James’ world was like both a slap in the face and a reminder
of her own weakness.’

To refer back briefly to that hoary old Head versus
Heart debate, which I broached in my review of John Banville’s Eclipse
in last month’s issue of this magazine, what we have with McKinney
is someone who gets her facts straight, but this does not lead to
any diminishment of feeling. This woman does her homework, and so
there are detailed references scattered throughout the stories to
different types of winds, cars, flowers, fish, Indian tribes and
American baseball teams. This capacious knowledge provides her with
an almost mythological backdrop, and proves that fierce intelligence
does not necessarily function as a defence against genuine, indeed
uncontrollable and uncontainable, feeling. Rather, it intensifies
it. This is nowhere more apparent than in the title story, which
is ostensibly about what we euphemistically call ‘The Northern Situation’,
but is framed within an acute, and much broader, meditation on what
happens when media become more important than messages, forms more
important than feelings. For McKinney’s greatest fascination is
with language itself, and it is the subject she collects most facts
about, all the while knowing that facts only get you so far.

This boundless facility with words, coupled with
her exploration of the deepest and most contradictory corners of
the human heart, make her one of an increasingly rare breed: a writer
who can actually write, i.e. use language to enhance and realise
her purpose, rather than merely dole out drearily flaccid, badly
expressed, descriptions of emotional states. Check out these wonderful,
randomly chosen, phrases: ‘Diane had always been intimidated by
their coltish invention, their energy, their swaggering tetch.’;
‘...but his energy and menacing optimism had just, somehow, magicked
the fearlessness from her, leaving her solid and dependable and
cautious.’; ‘...his persuasive breeziness...’; ‘...his bouncy independence...’;
‘All the lopsided ferocities of the past month fell away; the crushing,
cavalier kindnesses of family and friends, their terrible gifts
of sympathy, their breezy interference.’; ‘...the livid, cheerful
threnody...’. It is unlikely that a more bracing and invigorating
debut collection of short stories will be published in this, or
indeed many another, year. More please, as soon as you’re ready.